 today. Can you hear me? I can. You sound good. OK. Let me know if you can see my screen here. Perfect. First try to. It appears to be even the right screen. I see a big momentum moves daily. Great. Let me know if you want to get started. Go for it. And bless you, Kelly, and the controller. I just heard that sneeze over here. It's all yours, Melissa. I'll get out of your way. And thanks for joining us today. Well, thank you so much for having me. Good afternoon, everybody. How's everybody doing today? Crazy day again in the market. Lots of volatility this year in 2022. And actually, that has made for some exciting trading days. This week is no exception to that. We're going to continue to see that even tomorrow. Tomorrow is Wednesday. And the Fed rate decision comes out tomorrow. Of course, it's probably going to be a quarter percent bump in rates. That will undoubtedly have some type of market reaction. But I think that the market is expecting a quarter percent bump. But I think the market is going to look for really what the Fed chairman says specifically about after tomorrow, going into the second half of 2022. Because obviously, we've had a lot of issues. The market's been selling off since the beginning of the year. And there's a war going on with Russia and Ukraine. So it'll be a very wild day tomorrow, I think, in the markets. But overall, looking for momentum is what I try to do each and every single solitary day. I do tend to air to the short side first. In other words, I prefer to short. I've found a niche actually not just in doing momentum, which is the topic of today's lecture, but also in shorting. I will go long. I'm happy to go long. Actually, we had a trade. We're going to go over this chart. And here we went long. We did calls in CBX. That's an oil stock. It's Chevron. But I do prefer to short. So we've had a lot of nice shorts this year, mainly because the market's been selling off. And lots of stocks have been selling off with it. So if you have any questions, let me just see if I can pull up the chat here. Chat. Okay, there's the chat. If you have questions, you can ask me as we go along and I will try to answer them today. If you have questions afterwards, you can email me at melissathestockswish.com. You can also feel free to call me at 929-3200 gap. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. And you can also watch me on television. I appear in pretty much every single network, mostly Fox News and CBS News to discuss markets. And again, this has been a wild ride this year. And I don't see it changing anytime soon. I think pretty much the market is gonna continue to be volatile like this into at least the summer period of 2022. So let's talk about momentum. Why is playing momentum advantageous? Because you can make a lot of money with momentum. Another one's think about it. If you take a position in stocks, say you wanna go long and the stock rallies 10 cents, while you could be up a little bit of money, say you have a thousand shares and you're up 100 bucks with the 10 cent gain, that's all well and good. But wouldn't it be a lot better if you took a thousand shares and something bought a stock and it rallied a dollar? You'd be up a thousand dollars, okay? A dollar is a bigger move than 10 cents. So obviously any single thing that we do, it doesn't matter what stock I'm looking at, what stock I'm trading, I'm trying to make dollars, not pennies. I'm looking for momentum. I'm not scouting, okay? So we're looking for big moves. That's how one individual trader, like someone like you and every single person that's here can make money. Unless you have millions of millions of millions of dollars, you're not gonna be able to make lots of money trading unless you get big moves of momentum. And by the by, even people that have huge accounts, big hedge funds, big professional traders, they still want momentum too. They're not looking to scout. They're not looking to play the long game or the big move. That big move could be a day, could be a couple of days, it could be a couple of weeks, could be a couple of months. But either way, everybody that trades that wants to make any kind of money at all wants to have a bigger move instead of a small move. I think traders tend to be satisfied with small gains or scout things with small gains because they're so afraid of losing and they're so used to losing that they just get so scared and they're afraid of holding something to get a big move. But this is really how you can make money in the market. And again, let's talk about momentum here. This is a chart of the QQQ, he's going back. But I'm gonna go back here to last year. Okay, we're in November, 2021. Hard to believe it's March, halfway through March, here we are, March 15th. So this was November 22nd, 2021. That was the last time the QQQs made a brand new altim high. Hard to believe. November, December, January, February, March, four and a half, five months ago. Really, really hard to believe considering the move the market made in 2021 to the upside. We attempted a new high in December, it failed. Okay. And then we also tried it again at the beginning of 2022, didn't work out. So the momentum, I'm just looking here, we're in January, get the drop, boom. This is into February-ish, okay, early March, here we are now. We have been what? We have been selling off. Again, you don't have to be exact here, take it to the right, see where we are roughly. This is again, back at the beginning of the year, start out the year and where we've fallen from. And again, we broke that area yesterday. We were like around 317 and change in the QQQs. So that's quite a dip, quite a dip to start out this calendar year. I know we rallied today, I don't have that bar in here, but it wouldn't make a hell of a difference. We still have had a sell-off to the downside. So the momentum has been to the downside for the market this year. And I said the overall market for the ZETF for the NASDAQ, it's a QQQs. Let's look at another one here, talking about momentum, PayPal. Did a bunch of nice trades in this guy too. Again, stock had earnings here. Again, look where the price was before the earnings around 180, gap down here on the earnings. We're gonna talk about gaps in a minute, got a sell-off, boom. So from right before the earnings, 180, to be down here, lost basically almost half its price within two months, not even, a month and a half. So again, the momentum is what? First of all, it's there, it's real, it's big, it's not nothing, it's a lot, and it's also to the downside, okay? So you could have made many shorty PayPal, that's what we did. You could have made money doing puts in PayPal, that's what we did, saving with the market, okay? So the bottom line is that you can make a lot of money playing momentum, and that's the reason to do it. That's the reason to do it, and quite frankly, it makes it a lot of fun, trading momentum. Again, it's not that much fun if you are risking $1,000 and making 100 bucks. Kinda doesn't really make any sense to do it, think about it. It's like risking $100 and then getting out with a dollar profit. Kinda silly, do you know what I'm saying? So the idea, again, is not to make pennies, the idea is to make dollars, that's how you're gonna get somewhere with this, that's how you're gonna get ahead. So learning what to do is very important when risking your own money if you wanna trade the market, and I think a lot of people will come to webinars like today, many, many lectures and speakers today, will watch free radios, and that's all well and good, but at the end of the day, you all know what to do unless you really learn how to do it, and that does mean learning from someone, you can call that person a mentor, an educator, a teacher, but someone that has a specific way or a method that they look at stocks or the market or how to train, and so you have a backdrop, a foundation for why you were taking the trade in the first place, and I think that's something that many traders lack. They're used to doing things or trying bits and pieces of things all over the place, and they never really stay on top of one thing or never really learn to get good at one particular thing. I started trading at the end of 2008, I did not know what I was doing, I took one class, at that time it was expensive, but looking back, I got a good foundation for how to trade, but I didn't learn how to make money. After that, I decided to teach myself how to trade, and it took me about three years to develop my own system, which was a very long and hard road for me because I used real money to trade whilst developing the system, so I was losing at the beginning, and again, it was a back and forth process, and when you come to me if you wanna learn from me, if you decide at the end of the seminar today you want to do that, you're paying me for my information and my time to learn what took me three years. I think when people are all over the place with their trading choices and decisions, it becomes more gambling than a thought out process, and for me, when I try to make a decision, I never think I'm gonna lose. Does that mean that every trade that I take works? No, but I never believe that a trade that I take, when I take the position and risk money, I never think it's going to lose, otherwise I wouldn't take it, so I call it 100% conviction, I believe it's going to work. Again, I go in with that mentality, with that thought process of an understanding of what I'm doing, I put the risk on, you can't risk more than you can afford, put the risk on and that's how I trade, and again, my win ratio is around 80% give or take, we'll talk about that later, but if you haven't added to where you're gambling, where it's a 50-50, this type of market, especially since the beginning of the year, is really chopping you up. You're back and forth, back and forth, going along, killing it, shorting it, killing it, back and forth, and again, look for this to continue. This is going to continue past March, into April, into the summer, and again, even the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while many people think this is over, I say not so fast, not so fast. I think inflation's going to continue, gas prices are going to continue to go up, and I think the crisis it's happening overseas is going to continue, and I also think it's going to affect overall, it's going to affect what's happening in the markets, and that's just basically the world that we live in. Everything is so, so, so interconnected right now. We're all so interconnected, and something could happen overseas while we're asleep, while we're asleep, and then all of a sudden you get up in the morning, and you could be in a position and it's upside down, especially if you're in a swing trade or something like that. When I'm doing options, and we'll talk about them too, I'm in a fixed-risk position, which means I have a fixed risk, I can't lose any more even if it goes back against me, if you risk $1,000 in an option, you can't lose more than that, or whatever it happens to be. That's a nice thing about options, it's the stop basically is the trade position or is the risk. So anyways, let's talk about 2022 versus 2021. So here we are, the spot. There's a chart of the spot, again going back to the beginning of 2022. We did make a brand new all-time high here in the spot at the beginning of the year. We did actually, then we dropped off, and here was all into January with the sell-off, and then we have all into the February with this sell-off, and so on and so forth, and here we are at the beginning of March. So again, we actually did make a new high in the spy at the beginning of the year. We did not in the cues, and we didn't in the diamonds, okay? Let me just see here, okay. So is it possible to work full-time and trade and make money on the side too? The answer is yes. So some people are trading with me, trading full-time. Some people are trading with me and they're working full-time and trading on the side. I think that if this is something you want to do full-time, you have to find a way to transition doing it. Maybe that's doing options while you're at your job working, put the position on, put a sell order, as a day order, cancel order, if it gets you out, and my classes are on the weekends, so if you're working full-time, you can learn them in the weekends as well, but when I started trading my idea and my whole philosophy, the reason I began was because I wanted a new career. I was doing mortgages at the time. So it is possible, it may be hard work to make a transition like that, but I think if nothing else, this past two years has really taught people how, being self-sufficient, working for yourself actually is very, very, very important when you're in charge of your own money and you're in charge of your own choices. And if you're someone that wants to trade, if you're very entrepreneurial, you understand that it is important to be in control of your own finances. And a lot of people are getting scared with that right now, specifically because of the sell-off in the market, particularly if they have money invested in their 401k or the retirement account. You see the drop-off, like I said, since the highs. But overall, the market has been bullish for the last two years. We're really even going back to 2016 when Trump was elected. We screeched up higher from 2016. If you think about it, really, in the five-year period from 2016 to 2021. But now we're in a period of inflation. Things are changing. Things are getting different. The idea of making extra money is actually something that appeals to people from all walks of life, no matter what you do. It's interesting. I always ask people, what do you do for a living? They come and they take my class. I have people from all walks of life, teachers, housewives, nurses, truckers, dentists, doctors, accountants, a veterinarian, people that do all kinds of things, people that have never traded before, people that have traded before, people that wanna come and learn what I do. It doesn't matter what you're doing, where you're from, where you're living, or what your background is. I think that you can do it. I think that you can do it. Again, it doesn't mean it's not gonna be work to learn it until you learn it, but you still can do it. But you need a strategy in order to make money in the market. You need a strategy really to spot momentum beforehand. So again, you know where the money is going to flow. And when I'm saying momentum, I'm saying where the money is gonna go. Because the money creates the momentum. If two million dollars wants to commit it and buy something like Apple or Facebook or the market, it's gonna push it up. So that creates the move up, which is the money, which is buying, which is gonna be the price higher. A lot of people right now are buying the dip. What happened to the market today? We were talking about this earlier, don't know if the bar of the market in here, but we rally today. I didn't look and see exactly where we closed because I was getting ready to come on. But we closed green today. It closed green today in the spot, it closed green today in the QQQs. Do I think that holds? No, I don't, I do not. But people like to buy the dip. If you were buying the dip all of 2021, you made money in strong stocks, long stocks, the market, pretty much anything you could have bought the dip in 2021 and made money. It was a very easy year to do particularly swing trades. That was not a normal environment. That was not a normal market. That is not gonna work this year. It already has not. But in my mind, buying the dip is not a philosophy or a strategy that you should use overall to ever, ever trade. You know, you have to think about it like not like your Warren Buffett where you have XYZ amount of money that you can just risk and wait until it stops dropping. People that are buying the dip right now are basically buying stuff that's falling. And again, I don't think this rally today holds at all. In fact, we could lose it tomorrow. I don't know if we're gonna lose it tomorrow. I won't know until I get out, but we could, we could. So again, many traders have been buying the dip from 2021, thought, well, this is working. And then all of a sudden they get up and it doesn't work one day, which obviously was the beginning of January this year. But you can make money in the market. People do it all the time. However, not everyone does. Why? Many, many reasons, but people just do not have consistent gains. It's not about sometimes it's worked. So sometimes buying the dip in the market works, sure. Does it work consistently? More than it loses? No, no. And that is the whole point. Because as an individual trader, if you wanna make money, you have to make money more than you lose. So let's talk about this. We were talking about momentum, and I mentioned this stock earlier, CVX, okay? CVX has been on a tear. This is Chevron. This is a daily chart. Just go back to, again, this is an oil stock. Just go back to here at the beginning of 2022. See where the stock price was here? Approximately in January, beginning of the year, it was roughly at around 120. Took off like a rocket. Almost got up to 180. Was at one, almost at 175. Almost right up at 175 in this rally. Show a really, really nice move in this. This is momentum. This is buying. This is buying. So the stock got bought. Where is momentum in this? To the upside. To the upside. So how would you have made money in this? You would have made money going long. And we did go long. We went long calls in here. We didn't go long at the beginning of the year, but we did go long in the last few weeks, okay? So again, this is momentum. It's up, okay? The price is moving higher. And again, it's moving in a big way, okay? And any questions? I don't, I actually can't see the questions. I can see the chat, Jeff. I don't know why I can't see the questions. I can't see any questions at all, but I can see the chat. It's in the questions console, but we don't have a lot of questions. Oh, okay. We have a question that wasn't answered before. If you do have questions from Melissa, go ahead and type them in either through YouTube or in the go-to webinar and I'll pass them along to you, Melissa. Okay, great. Thank you. So let's talk about how do we find momentum? How do we find it? How do we find it? My strategy to find momentum is gaps, okay? So long story short, I'm always looking for momentum to train because if I don't see that momentum is gonna come in and grab hold of the stock and push it down that I can short it or help it go up so I can go long, I don't wanna do it. We talked about that earlier. I don't wanna scalp something, okay? But anyways, what is my strategy? My strategy is gaps. Why gaps? Why am I looking for gaps? Because that's where the momentum is. That's where the momentum is. So if I see a gap, I'm looking at it to try to spot and find the momentum. So what is a gap? Let's go over it. This is a chart of the spot. Again, this is the ETF for the SMP. I'm gonna just go back here. There's a lot of gaps here. Oh no, let's go to this one. Let's go to this one here at the beginning of February. The spot closed here, gap down. So what is it got? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. Closed here, open here, fell. You could have shorted this. So a gap is the difference between the close and the open. The market always closes at what time? Four o'clock, and it always opens where? At 9.30 in the morning, Eastern time. So if you have the price open lower, that is a gap down. What about gap ups? Do you have gap ups? Yes, here's a gap up. Market close of four o'clock here. Open here at 9.30, gap up, rally. Gap up again here, rally. So this is a gap up. This is a gap down. Again, what is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. Here's another one over here. This was January. Closed here at four o'clock, boom. Open higher at 9.30, tried to rally, then lost to the next day, boom. Gap down. So here's a gap up, here's a gap down. Here was the start of the sell off that went like this. Do, do, do. Okay, here again is a momentum to the downside. So momentum comes in in gaps. Okay, so that's why I'm looking for them. Here is another one here, Facebook. Again, what is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. Closed up here, open down here, fell. So again, closed here, open here, fell. This is Facebook this was earning. So Facebook had earnings this night. It was above three 20. Then all of a sudden the next day in the morning a stock bombed. It was at two 40. This is a rather large gap. Again, where is the momentum in the gap and then it sells off. And that's what happened here. So gaps are very, very, very, very, very, very powerful. Okay, there are some bullish gaps up here too. We didn't do these, we did this one here. So the point I'm trying to make is you only need one good thing to make money. You find momentum, you only need one good trade today to make money, but you could do it as a day trade and an option. You could do two trades, the same stock in two different ways. You could do a swing trade too, or you could just do one trade today, whatever you wanna do. It's the same system, the same idea, the same concept, looking for momentum, getting the big move. Again, it's not scalping. Think about it. If you get a dollar moving something or you could do four trades, you get 25 cents each. Again, your odds go down the more you trade. Your odds go down the more trades you take. The idea is slimming it down. It's trying to like, I'm trying to hit a bullseye every day. Can I hit a bullseye every single day from 9.30 to four? No, nobody could. That's crazy. I can hit a bullseye between 9.30 and 10 a.m. and that's what I'm looking to do it. Five times a week. But the idea of trading for six and a half hours a day, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's highly unlikely. And when would it be possible on days, for example, when the market power trends? We have had some days like that actually this year. It's very, very, very rare that the market power trends in one direction for the entire day. When it does, you could do every single thing that's falling or every single thing that's rallying with the market. The market might power trend four, five, six times a year. It's rare. It's rare. That's the only time you could hit a bullseye all day from 9.30 to four. And even then, you better get the direction right in the market when you're reading it because most stocks will go with the market on any given day, okay? So I look for a way every morning using my system which I use a checklist to make the picks because I'm trying to find one thing. That's it. That's the whole point. You only need one thing that moves and a method and structure to enter and exit the picks. Now let's talk about some day trades that we did here. Remember, we were talking about momentum. Here's another one. Just quickly, quickly, quickly looking at this without even thinking about anything at all. You can see from November, the stock was above 200 all the way back here. Felf a cliff again has lost more than half its value since here we are in March. So the momentum was what? Selling, selling pressure, okay? Something can't go from 200 to 95 without selling. It's the only way it's going there. It's going down, okay? And again, this is a nice, nice move no matter what day you played it, how you played it, however you played it. Now we ended up doing a day trade here. I know this doesn't look like much but actually it was a nice trade. Stack close to your gap, down, boom. We shorted it, got out. We chunked it. This was a day trade. I'm gonna show it to you here. This is the one minute, okay? It was on three, two. There's three, two here. Oh, here, three, two. See, this is a one minute. So these bars are really, really tiny. We shorted it, got in, got the drop. Again, here's some momentum. Got the drop into the morning. Remember I was telling you between 9.30 and 10, that's what I'm trying to focus. Get the drop, boom, out, done. So the trade we did, the day trade, and I run a lot of trading room. If you'd like a trial, you can email me if you'd like a trial for the rest of the week but we entered and shorted it at 1.1750. With 800 shares, your risk was 3,040. You do not have to risk less. You could risk less, a third of that if you want. Added, we added it at the same price, 1.1750. Total share, 1,600. Average price then was the same, 1.1750. Exit, 1.1475. Profit was 4,400 dollars. So this was a beautiful move. Again, almost $3. Remember we're talking about momentum. This is momentum. This is selling. This is to the downside, we shorted it. Again, you're not trying to get in and out for 30 cents. You're trying to get in and out for three bucks in a stock like this. And what's so interesting, I'm gonna go back to the dailies, that's this. This may not look like anything at all. But if you take it over here and you get in with a good entry at a perfect, perfect timing, boom. And you get the drop. Again, that was a short, okay? So in the live trading room, I'll call the entry, I'll call the stop. I do use stops. Now let's talk about BA. BA, again, we were discussing momentum. We were discussing what's happening with different things. I didn't look at where this was today. We've done shorts in this. We did a short in this here on 228. Even this, this is a one minute chart. And actually I'm gonna go show you the dailies in a second. We shorted this, we got in and out. I try to do my day trades fast, boom, in and out. We shorted this, got in and out and made money right in here 228. Now let's find 228 on the dailies. We shorted that day. The day that it flipped, it was because it was a fed, some kind of fed minutes or something that happened that day. It actually flipped that day, fell the next day, boom. But this particular day, we did the day trade. We were in, out, and we booked it, and we shortened it, and we got out. Again, the momentum I knew was to the downside. We did puts then to get this drop. But we did a day trade here on 228. What did it do? It gapped down, stock closed here, gapped down. And here was the short, right in here. So we entered in at 198, 50. Shares was 1500, risk was 2700, exit was 19690. Again, you take it, you get in, get out. A buck 50, buck 60, get it down, profit 2400. Every single trade that you take, you should try to make one to one. Instead of making one 10th or one 20th, your goal should be one to one. If you risk a thousand, looking to make a thousand. You're risking 500, you're looking to make 500. That's worth trading. That's worth taking on the risk, do you understand? To me, it just doesn't make sense to take on the risk. Cause every time you put a trade on, you're taking on the risk. What do I mean by risk? I mean, the possibility of the trade could lose. It could either stop you out, it could go against you. The reward has to be possible to do it and get the money, the money, which is what you're looking for, close to 100%. One turnaround of it. But the whole point I'm trying to make is that if you can predict the momentum, if you can predict what somebody's gonna do before it does it, whether rally up or fall, then you can make money. Then you can make money, okay? And that is the whole idea of what we're trying to do and how am I able to predict it and pinpoint it? Well, this is where I have an itch. I'm looking for the gap, but not every gap works. So most things gap on any particular day. There's thousands of things that gap every day. Can you trade every gap? No, you can't. I'm looking for gaps that are created by large institutional money. So gaps are created by large institutional money. That is what makes the gap in the first place. The professional gaps that happen in play out and stocks are formed by one thing and one thing only, large institutional money. Therefore, you need a way that will help you pick the correct direction to play the gap and confirm that the large money will flow with it. So I'm looking for what? Big, big money. What do I mean by large institutional money? Big buying, big selling, lots of buying and lots of selling. So again, if you're a hedge fund, you come in, you're coming in and taking a big position. It's like a big footprint that comes into the stock. You saw that with the Facebook after the earnings. So we're looking to follow the footprints of institutional money that come in and stop because guess what? They create the momentum because they're taking the big positions are made with what? Money. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of money, okay? Lots of it. So we were kind of talking about this a little bit here. We were talking about how much money do you need and what kind of returns can you earn? It really depends if you want to day trade or do options. If you want to do options, you can open up a cash in account with $2,000 minimum. If you want to do day trades, you need a margin account. You have to go to a broker and find out what their margin account requirements are. Retail broker is going to require you to have $25,000 to trade on margin daily, in and out, in and out. Or you can go to a prop place, in which case they'd probably require you with $5,000. You have to find out there's different places that you can trade. If you want to be active, then you need a margin account. There's just no way about it. If you don't want to be active or you just want to do options, you can open up an options account. You can still do a couple trades a week and you can still make money. But the idea is flipping it around. 50% is good in an option. 100% is my goal. And I'm looking for one-to-one when I'm doing a day trade. Now again, we've been talking about options too. Let's talk about some options trades. This again was the Facebook. Again, big money for whatever reason. Again, I don't follow fundamentals. I'm not watching the news every second of the day. I have it on the background. But if you get ingrained in trying to make decisions on what's going to happen with Russia and Ukraine, nobody knows. Nobody knows. You can make your assessments. It changes by the minute. So look at the price. Look at the daily. All these charts here I have in here are the daily. Daily, daily, daily. This is a daily chart of Facebook. So what did institutional money do with Facebook on this particular day? Sold it. They tanked it. Tanked it down. Again, the stock closed up here above 320. I don't know the exact close was here. And tanked. Okay. Basically sold off almost 100 points in the gap. Okay. Now, before that though, we actually did an options trade before that, which was a put. 113, I called Facebook 330 puts. It expired 121. I have an options newsletter. The trades come emailed to you. I sent this out 10, 17 in the morning on the 13th. So let's take a look at the daily. The daily of Facebook was here. Take it to the right 330. So I called it's right basically at the strike. Again, for an expiration date of the 21st. Again, how do you make money? Trade the momentum. Okay. Here is the drop. Boom. Boom. Again, we did the 330 puts. It went down, down, down, down, down, down. You see this? And this was before this actually. So, oops. The trade was the cost of the Facebook puts, which was at the money, $3.80. Three contracts cost 1140. Solitude 12, profit $2,460 with 1140 risk. Pretty good trade. 216% return on investment. This is in and out, in and out. You take it, get the momentum, get out. And actually this trade was up nicely since the beginning. You let it slide on down. Again, it's selling. And when I'm doing my options, it's the same philosophy. It's the same philosophy. I'm playing momentum. I'm playing the gap. I'm playing buying. I'm playing selling. Whatever's happened to be, I'm looking for the institutional money. I'm not worried about pennies, about my fill of saving a couple of pennies of this or time value or anything like that. I'm looking for the momentum to come in pretty quickly to take it in my direction, whatever I happen to do. And I'm doing the weeklies. Okay, I'm doing the weeklies. It's the same concept, same philosophy, cheaper way to play the stock, particularly something like this at this price point rather than a margin. And again, I can hold overnight when I'm doing options, which is a benefit of options versus doing the day trades. Although I like both. I like both. I like to do both. Let's go over Netflix. Here was another gap. Stock closed here, gap down. This was a Netflix here. This was right before the earnings. It was around five 20-ish, boom. Gap down the next day here under 400. Again, institutional money tanked it, sold it, sold the gap down, sold the chart down. Again, why? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn't matter. It fell. This was a gap down. And a crushing gap it was actually, okay? This was way back in the middle of January. We did do a put on the exact same day on the 13th of January here. This closed here, this gap down. We entered puts in Netflix there. They were the five 20s. Same day, it was the 13th in the morning, expired at the 21st. Now, the earnings came out the night of the 20th. I did not hold this trade through the earnings wide. What if they had been, what if the stock had gapped up, went up to $650? I didn't know. And the trade was profitable beforehand. So this trade was a 78% return in investment with an exit on 120 before the earnings. You could have spent 1350 and sold it for 24 and made 78% return investment as a good trade. I put this here. The close of the option in the last day of expiration was 125 because of what it did. And you could have risked 1350 amid 11,150. I did not hold that. You know, the trade was there if you wanted to. But when you hold to the very last day, which I never tell people to do, you always take the risk, the trade could completely go against you. If I'm down in the trade, for example, I'm down in the trade, it's the last day, I'm already down, I have nothing to lose, I'm already down in the trade, then I'll hold the last day. But I typically do not hold the last day if I'm already up. In this case here, really worked in your favor. Really worked in your favor, why? Because again, I called the five 20 puts. A put is a short. And the stock was here before the earnings and the next day was at 400. And that is why that trade was worth at the close. Not even high the options, the next day on the 21st, it was worth 125. Again, I don't know if anybody did that on my newsletter or not, but it was there. It shows you the power of the gap though. It is a great example of the power of institutional money, the power of the gap, the power of how much money you can make. For example, what you could have done, again, I did not do this because the trade was up, but what you could have done, oops, where was I, here, Netflix, you could have taken two contracts, got out of one, booked it, kept the other one on, and you could have just kept it on into the earnings to see what would happen. You could have done that. So you could have split it. Knowing that the earnings was coming out that night, which it was. Let's talk about the spy. Again, momentum, momentum, momentum. What's been happening, the spy selling? So we did that same day, same day, same time, 471 spy plots expired the same day too. 340 was the cost of this one on this particular day. Risk was 1,020, sold at $24, profit 6,180, return investment 6.06. Again, this was momentum to the downside. So we're going all the way back here. January 13th, we did putts, take it to the right, we did them at the money, boom, got the drop. Boom, got the drop, here's the drop. Again, selling, momentum to the downside, huge trade. It was never, never, never down. Never down, never down, never down. No money management really needed even in this one. Get out wherever you want. It was a beautiful engineering. Again, options are about capturing it at the timing and getting the direction right at the timing that you can decide even like with a Netflix. If you want to hold it, get out of some, split it, do whatever. That was a nice call. And again, you can risk more than this. You can do more. Any questions here so far? So when you're looking to trade, again. So yeah, we do have a few questions. Okay, go ahead. Um, somebody wanted to know when you look for, do you look for a certain size gap down when you're looking for gaps? No, not necessarily, no. No, I do not. I know everyone wants it to be black and white where they can just plug it into a scanner and go, boop. No, I do not. As you can see, we traded Facebook, we traded Netflix and then we also traded them in days where the gaps weren't big. So no, it's not like that. It's not like you just say, well, everything's down or up 10% or whatever it isn't. It's not that easy. Every single day and every single gap and every single chart is in its unique own planet. Like tomorrow morning I get up, I look at exactly what I'm looking at for the thing I'm looking at. I look at and analyze everyone like it's own different day. All right, and then we had another question about how often do you find the gaps actually fell? I have about an 80% win ratio. So that means if you take 10 trades with me, eight are gonna win and two are gonna lose. So that's pretty much my win ratio for losses and wins. That sounds pretty good. That's also that catches up with the questions. So thank you. Anyways, getting back to goals. If you have a goal, I find it easier for people to break it down. Like some people say, well, I wanna make this much money a year. And then they're overwhelmed by that. Chunk it out, break it down. Break it down monthly, weekly, daily. It's gonna be a lot easier for you to hit your goals if you can wrap your head around it. A lot of times people are losing for so many years. They can't even wrap their head around. The idea of even making any money at all. So go and back it off and set a weekly goal for yourself. Say, I wanna make $2,000 this week. Then next week I wanna make 2,500. Then after that I wanna make 3,000, whatever you wanna do. If you can just break it down and chunk it out, you will get to the point, 3,001 week, 3,000 the next week, 3,000 the next week. Then all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, I just made $9,000 in three weeks. At that, I find that's a lot easier for people to comprehend. It's a lot easier for people to wrap their head around the concept of chunking out profits rather than constantly just being heavy handed, like I said, where you're trading every single solitary day or all day. But success or failure, if you've been trading for a while, you know this really has to do with the quality of your system. And if you're losing, you probably don't have a good trading system. You probably don't have anything that makes any money, like we take trades that sometimes we're just looking for a normal move, but sometimes you get these huge trades. The spy was one of them. And the reality is you will have those trades if you're looking for momentum, to get the momentum for the reasons I explained earlier about institutional money. You're never gonna have big wins like that if you're only always scalping stuff. And then what happens is it doesn't cover the losses. So you must have a niche if you want to get ahead, particularly in trading, because all trading is, is you're taking money from somebody else. It's a zero-sum game. You are taking money from another person on this planet when you make money. You're not knitting socks and selling the socks out to people to put on their feet. You aren't creating anything, okay? You are, you're going into the market and you're taking risks. The smartest person wins. The one that gets it right is the only one that gets the cash. So you got to be right more than you're wrong. You got to be the smartest person in the room. And that's one of the reasons I follow institutional money because that money has a lot going for it. It is what you would want to call the smart money. They are making decisions based on lots of things. They have connections to the administration. They have political connections. They do what's happening overseas in global markets. They are paying for research reports. They are investing billions of dollars, okay? People are right now, institutions are not buying this market. It is, it's not happening. I don't care that we rally today. Institutions aren't buying this market here. And that's why we're lower. But the reality is that my niche looks for that institutional money in the gap. And if you want to win and get ahead, you have to have a niche because everybody's trying to fight for the same thing, which is the cash, which is the money. And again, we're not producing anything. We're taking money from some other person. Could be the neighbor, could be the guy next door, okay? This is an independent activity. It's, you know, it's a winner takes all kind of philosophy and we did talk about this. We did talk about CVX. And what I found so interesting, just teaching people for as long as I have this, traders have such a difficulty understanding momentum. They're scared of it, they don't get it, they don't boot it. That, I mean, think about it. It's common sense. It's common sense. It's also common sense that you can't go with the crowd. It's common sense even going with institutional money. It's common sense with going with big money, big positions, momentum, volume, okay? So the big money that I'm looking for, pinpoints the direction of the footprints of institutional money and gaps. That's my system. It's a rating system I use every morning. And it's not based on percentages at all. If it was that easy, you plug it into a system and you could just not even think on any day. Again, what do I mean by institutional money? It could be up like CVX, which is buying. It could be down like Facebook, which is selling or shorts. Institutional money can short a stock too. Okay, they can take short positions, hedge funds as well. Again, Netflix was the downside. Again, could be a big gap, could be a small gap. We play this little tiny baby one. It was profitable. Same thing in Facebook, this one was too. So it's whatever you wanna get, but gaps are an event. They create a sense of urgency. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. Bye-bye-bye, sell, sell, sell, okay? Thus an action is being forced by participants of the stock. And this is why gap trading is incredibly powerful. That power that comes in allows you to risk and take two, 3,000 shares or 10 contracts and still make a couple grand. So you don't have to take 50,000 contracts in a penny stock, which is absurd. And I don't trade penny stocks or low float stocks and they're junk. And the only way you can make a lot of money is take your big positions and then you can't get in and out right. And they don't have the volume. It's crazy to do that. And people that do that are scalping in anyways. We wanna be like a dot. Like you're taking a position in Apple and no one even knows they're there and you could have 5,000 shares of it and no one even knows they're there. You are a dot in that stock. It's the idea that you're following the institutional money. Again, we go long, we short. I do prefer to short and I found that's a niche for myself as well because for some reason most retail traders like the idea of buying low and selling hot which is why they buy the dip. It does not work consistently make money. And the head fake right now for people while they're struggling since the beginning of this year and people that do that is that it has not worked this year but it did work last year and people thought they knew how to make money and they don't but overall if you've been trading for five, six, eight, 10 years even when the market was bullish even since the run up like I said in the last couple of years it did not work all the time consistently even then. And it just doesn't. You're not a long-term investor worn Buffett buying and holding forever and you don't care where it falls to. You're still in it and you're suffering through the drop. You can't do that as an individual trader. Your goal is to make money consistently every day or a couple of times a week or whenever you wanna trade it. The idea is to chunk it out to get somewhere by in, out, in, out not taking it and holding, holding, holding forever. Okay, I'm not even doing leaps which are long-term options which actually you could do. I think one person particularly that's on my options newsletter took a trade I called and took it out longer to leave but he got out of it. But again, I find it's very easy to predict. For example, like if you said to me what do you have for dinner tonight? I'd say I'm having chicken. If you said what do you have in dinner Melissa a week from Tuesday? I'd say I have absolutely no idea what I'm having dinner a week from now. It's very easy to look in the short-term and the short-term to predict where something is gonna go than when looking in the longer-term. Like again, I'm giving you an overall general analysis telling you the volatility is gonna continue into the summer of 2022. If you said to me, Melissa between now and the end of 2022 are we gonna make a new high in the market? I can't tell you yes or no. That's too far away. That's not in a half months away. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about picking the bottom. Don't worry about picking the top. Play it for what it is. When you get it, when you get the moves on momentum you take the trade, put the risk on and get out. That's your job as a trader. Your job is just to make money. Not predict what's gonna happen with Russia. Okay, nobody can predict that stuff. So anyways, if you wanna do this you have to make good choices. That means you plan an action using a system, good entries, you're not gonna retreat and then chunk it out when you're making your goals. And don't be afraid to take stops. I do use stops in my day trades. I don't use stops in my options because there's no need to because the risk is the stop. And back it off if you feel like you wanna kill an option if you take a trade, that means you don't believe in it. Back off your risk. I'd rather see people take it and hold it through. But either way, if you wanna make in this business as a day trader or an active trader or swing trader or options trader, you've gotta win. You've gotta win more than you lose. That's the only way to consistently get anywhere with this and that's why you've got to have also some nice big gains. And that means you need the momentum. So what helps me with this is the strategy I do that I use. Now, we were talking about win ratios at year to date this year, I'm 78% day trading, the day trader and win ratio 87% in options. We are just not losing in our options trades at all this year. I have been really on point with calling the market. Again, I'm telling you right now the rally today isn't gonna hold. Whether we lose it tomorrow whether we lose it Thursday whether it's Monday afternoon, I don't know but I know it's not gonna hold. So again, money management counts but getting the direction right is critical. It's critical. And I think sometimes people will do something, it works and they think it works all the time or they think it's a system or a strategy but it's really not. Again, look for a good return in investment and a good risk when you're trading and look for correct trade selection. What do I call it? Calculated risk. You say, okay, I'm gonna go through this, I'm gonna look at it, I'm gonna see and I'm gonna calculate it. I know this trade could lose but I believe it's going to work. And why do I believe it's gonna work? Again, these are the types of things that you have to work through. For me, it is the price. It is the price of it, the price action not the fundamental backings of it. I'm not reading what's happening on the earnings. What did they say about Netflix? Why did it gap down? I don't know, I don't care. I'm looking at the charts. I had the charts in here today. We talked about the daily. Trading successfully means focusing on taking trades with institutions because they're moving stocks, they're moving the market. They wanna buy something, they'll buy it like Chevron. If they wanna dump something like Facebook and dump it, it's gonna fall. That's it. You don't wanna be against those positions because you're gonna lose. Even if temporarily, you think you're in the right direction, you're gonna lose. Overall. Being on the side of institutions increases your odds to make profits because institutions make stock trends and with the market. Institutions either move stocks up or down. That's the only way you can go. If you want to get paid, then the key is to be in the trade with the large directional moves and you've gotta be with the power of money. Again, this is very important. So if you go where the power of money is flowing, you'll get the momentum. Why does this matter? So you know what direction to take the position. That is how you're gonna make money and then you get the big move. I'm very deliberate with my choices. Again, I'm giving you my market call here right now. No ifs ands or buts, okay? You take the trade, you put the money on, you get conviction, you be deliberate, you do it. What happens if you're wrong? If you're wrong, like I said, 20% of the time I lose. If you're wrong, you're wrong. You're losing that trade. It's not the end of the world. You set your risk accordingly. No one should ever be risking their whole account in one trade or two trades anyways, okay? So you have to say, okay, I have this much cash. I'm gonna divide it by and I'm gonna do this many trades a day or this many trades a week or one trade a day or whatever you're gonna do. Keeping in mind the idea that you're gonna win eight out of 10, but it's the conviction that helps you particularly. Like I might call a trade. I might call a trade in something and then it goes against me the day I call it and then poof, it goes the next day in my direction. You can't kill it. You can't kill it. Again, this is why keeping your risk a set amount that you can stay with it, believe in it, hold it. These markets are very choppy. There's very, very, very, very, very, very choppy. We're gonna see that tomorrow. We're gonna see that when the Fed talks tomorrow and again, it's really not gonna be the rain high because everybody knows it's gonna be a quarter percent and they're not gonna raise it a half a percent right now. What's happening overseas, but it's gonna be what they say, what they say tomorrow, pinpointing, are they going to raise them even more? How many times this year, later in the year, now that this is going on? That's gonna be critical for the market because if the market sees something that doesn't wanna see, it's gonna sell off tomorrow after two. But the idea of making money has to do with a system you do over and over in any market conditions with the consistency and then you do need a plan of action. But I think it's breaking it down to make goals for yourself by having a plan. I'm very big with paper, I like to write. I buy those notebooks like a Target and I write stuff all the time. Writing, writing, writing. We are in an electronic world and sometimes people get caught up when they're training like they're playing, you know, a computer game. This is not that. This is real money, it's money you work for, money you wanna put to good work and you can put it to good work. My God, even though rates have gone up, savings rates are like 0.0004%, it's ridiculous. You can make money in the market but you have to be thoughtful about what you're doing. So again, if you wanna come and learn from me, what will you learn? You'll learn my 26 point checklist, it's my system, it measures gaps by writing them in the daily chart to find stocks to trade that have a high probability. We're looking for high. Like I think this is worth doing, it's worth taking the risk out, I really think it's gonna work. High probability, not gambling, of directional bias for the entire debt. Big move in the day, gotta have it. Early confirmation of the bias and move between 9.30 and 10 in precise entries with follow-through and a good risk to reward target potential. So one strategy, in my mind is all you need to be successful, you can do it for swing trades, options or day trades but you don't need a general overall and broad-based view of the market to make money and in fact a lot of that's a waste of time. You know, you can learn how to read institutional money in the price patterns without having to follow the fundamentals. If that reinforces the trade decision for you, fine. But if it messes you up in the head to kill a position or not take a position or something like that, then it's bad to look at the fundamentals because very often they don't match what's happening in the technicals. You could have terrible earnings and a huge gap up. You could have, you know, a beautiful, fabulous earnings and a big gap down. One doesn't necessarily go with the other, it's very similar to the economy and the stock market. You may have bad economic data and the market gaps up and rallies or vice versa. So again, you might see exactly what the market expects tomorrow as far as the interest rates but the market may sell off anyways. It may sell off anyways or it may go, the rates may go up and then the market may rally tomorrow when the Fed talks and you say, why is the market rallying when rates are going up? That shouldn't be happening but it could be something else they say. No one knows. I'm not predicting what the Fed says tomorrow. I do not know. Tomorrow's gonna be a wild day but it's the idea of waiting and seeing the price action, seeing what happens and when it happens to know where to go to take the position to get in and get out. So what will you learn from me if you wanna come and learn from me a way to pick the best gap to play each day? That's very critical. A way to find and spot and play momentum. Again, very important to make money. You only need one trade that would date to make money and I don't care if it's an option or a day trade and again, that means less trades means less losses which means more wins. So you will learn the 26 point checklist from me. That's the meat and potatoes. People are doing very well with me. I've been getting a lot of nice testimonials and again, as I said at the beginning of the lecture, I am really shocked. I started to ask people just this year, what do you do for a living? You know, Mr. So and so. I find it very interesting how people are trading while they're working full time. People are doing all kinds of things that they've never done before and I just really find it very interesting. So I mean, I can't count out that anyone could do this really. It's the concept, it's the idea. You can't risk more than you can lose but people are really, really doing well this year. I think people are looking for something that works and again, 2021 was an easy year to go long. It's not the case anymore and so people now are looking for something else to do. The fact that I'm an expert in shorting is just a caveat. I'm very good at reading gaps. So again, we will go long the market again. I'm not going long here today. It doesn't make sense but we will again. I'm not predicting when. Again, that's like trying to predict what I'm gonna have for dinner a week from now. I do not know and I do not care. It's the idea of trading today and trading tomorrow and making money each and every single day when we're doing it. So education is important. Yes, there's a cost. The cost is not just the cost of the education. It's the cost of your time. For me, it's an entire weekend taking the class but it's an investment in your future if you wanna learn and you're far better off knowing what to do when having a mentor than trading on your own, particularly in these types of markets. But you've gotta be serious about it. And again, that means taking the time, processing the information, not gambling, and really learning from someone and then taking direction where you can bounce questions off of someone and ask them, what do you think? What do you think of this, Melissa? What's the target? Things like that. Anyways, the class I teach once a month, it's called the Golden Gap course. The Golden Gap course teaches a 26 point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course teaches what direction to play the stock. It also teaches you how to play the stock in the live day and take the entries and exits. The class teaches you how to read institutional position in stocks, which is very important. And the Golden Gap course teaches you how to day trade gaps. That is what I do. The purpose of the system is to help you evaluate which gap to trade each morning using a checklist. So I go through the checklist in the morning. Now if you sign up for the options newsletter, it's not a class, it's a newsletter. You get the trades emailed to you live. It's options trades. The day trade room is again a day trade room. I'm rating the gaps in the room. I'm rating the gaps for the letter. You're just getting the trade call if you sign up for the letter. If you wanna do the class, the system class is March 26th and 27th, nine to five. Class is online. Cost of the class is $69.99. Email me if you wanna sign up. You can not sign up through the website. I'm doing a webinar special. Be signed up by Friday. You get the trading room free to the end of 2022. This is a great offer. If you would like a trial for the room this week, email me. There's three days left. You can come in the room for the trial. You can have a free trial then until the end of this week. Now if you wanna just do options, I have a 12 month subscription for $69.99 and a six month subscription for $49.99. Again, this is for options trades only. And again, if you wanna trial, you can email me. Any questions here? I think I've made the time. Any questions towards the end here? Yeah, we do. Let's see. One of the questions we had, you were talking about minimum float and minimum volume. Do you have like a recommendation around minimum float and minimum volume? I would not trade anything with less than 300,000 volume. That's not a rule. That's just a general, my general experience is don't trade anything with less than 300,000 average volume on the day. Okay. Cynthia in YouTube has the phone comment and I don't know if you'll have it, but here's what she says. Barclays halted creating new shares of VXX and oil yesterday. Do you have any idea of what that means? Wait, say that again? Say that again? Barclays halted creating new shares of both VXX and oil yesterday. I didn't read anything about that, but my general take on what's happening as far as big institutions and reference to oil stocks is that they see that oil prices are gonna go higher. That's my general analysis of what I've read as far as things, and I was in a webinar with an institution about two weeks ago. They were not buying equities and they also are bullish on oil. What she just said about Barclays, I didn't see. If she wants to email me the article, I can read it and give you my analysis, but I know that the stock fell today and see VXX we have the chart in here. I would not be a bit surprised if it flips around between now and the end of next week, so that's my take on it. In other words, I wouldn't be shorting those stocks. Okay, Sid wants to know if only large institution can create gaps. Is that correct? No, you saw with the rise of Reddit in the last year where you saw a big move that happened in, I'm gonna just talk about GME. GME had a spike up and I'm not gonna go detail the controversy with that. It happened twice. Since then the stock has flatlined or sold off. People are waiting for that to pop again. It may never, ever, ever happen. So that is a one-saw. Could something like that occur again as a one-saw where retail traders create a move in a stock? Yes. It's that something happens on a regular basis every single day? No, it doesn't. And what you saw with GME is what has happened with some of the ones that they have made that moves you don't get any follow through. GME is basically dead. It's flatlined. No one's touched him with a 10 foot pole. If you look at it. Okay. That is the extent of the questions. So, thank you. Good job. Great. Thanks so much, Jeff. Have a great night, everyone. Stay safe. All right. Thank you, Melissa.